The Pokemon Center in Matcha City is in a big panic! Apparently,
people who had been using the pokemon transfer system to send pokemon
to their friends are finding that their rare and valuable pokemon are
being swapped out for common ones! Satoshi and his friends head
to the laboratory of the system's inventor, Akihabara-Hakase, in order
to see if it can be fixed. When they arrive, they are greeted by
a holographic rendering of the professor that informs them that the
Rocket-Dan are behind the system's malfunction. The hologram
leads Satoshi and his friends into a cylindrical chamber that can,
unknown to them, send them into the computer world! Once inside,
the trio, along with Akihabara-Hakase's Porygon, finds the Rocket-Dan
and see that they've set up road blocks to stop the flow of Monster
Balls. As a battle between Akihabara-Hakase's Porygon and a
Porygon the Rocket-Dan had stolen begins, Satoshi-tachi take the
opportunity to undo the Rocket trio's work. Elsewhere, Joi calls
a computer technician over to install an anti-virus program into the
transfer system's software. Once Akihabara-Hakase learns about
the program, he warns Satoshi-tachi that it will see them as a threat
and try to destroy them! Satoshi-tachi and Musashi-tachi hitch a
ride on the back of the professor's Porygon and high tail it to a
portal that will send them back to the real world. With only
seconds to spare, our heroes escape into the real world. Now that
the computer program has been fixed, Satoshi and his friends head off
on their next adventure.ThoughtsThis is going to be
another long one.

"Electric Soldier Porygon" is probably one of my favorite episodes from
the first series. The episode has a one-of-a-kind location (OMG
THeY'RE GOInG N2 THe DIgITAL W0RLD DIG1M0N RIP0FF!!!!11!!1!), shows off
an aspect of the franchise that's often overlooked, and has a really
eccentric character of the day. I mean, what's not to like about
a crazy old guy who greets visitors to his mansion-looking lab with a
3D hologram? Or about a Joi who actually takes matters into her
own hands?

I do find it kind of weird that the TV series makes Porygon out to be
this super powerful pokemon, though. It can shapeshift into all
sorts of weapons, can grow and shrink at will, and is able to copy any
pokemon's power with its Texture attack.

This episode also stands out to me not only because of what it did, but
also because it was my very first
exposure to
this franchise. By the time 1997 came around, I was hungry for
anything out there that had that "anime" label. Seriously, all
you had to tell me about a show was that it came from Japan and I'd
watch it, regardless of whether or not it actually sounded interesting.

So when I heard about how this Japanese cartoon
sickened "hundreds of children," my curiosity
was piqued. "What was this show about?" and "Why haven't I heard
of
it?," I asked myself. I eventually found out that "the show that
caused all those seizures" was coming to American TV, so I planted
myself in front of the TV to see this show for myself. I've been
here ever since.

Similar to "The Legend of Miniryuu," rumors
that an English language version of this episode exist persist to this
day. I have my doubts about that, but I'll get into that more at
the end of this essay.

Pocket
ni Fantasy replaces Nyasu
no Uta as the ending theme as of this episode in Japan.
Because, you know, we were overdue for a song that had absolutely
nothing to do with anything.

Side Note
I'll use one of these Side Note headings because I don't know where
else to put these.

The name of this episode's character-of-the-day, Akihabara-Hakase,
comes from the famous electronics district in Tokyo named Akihabara.
His name is also written entirely in kanji, as seen in the ending
credits, and that's pretty rare. In a franchise where everyone's
name is written out in katakana, having a character's name rendered
entirely in kanji is rare.

And here's another piece of trivia for you; this episode aired on
Inuyama Inuko (the voice actress for Nyasu)'s 32nd birthday.Why the episode was banned
I know I don't have to tell you this, but for those of you who somehow
don't know this: "Electric Soldier Porygon" is the episode that
caused seizure-like
symptoms in about 700 Japanese kids.

A quick Google search will give you more details, but the long and
short of it is that the alternating red and blue flashing lights
shown when Pikachu attacks an anti-virus missile about twenty minutes
into the episode triggered seizure-like symptoms in children across
Japan.

I don't know the first thing about seizures or the science behind what
caused them in this particular episode, so I'm not going to sit here
and start going on about it as if I do. There are tons of
articles on the Internet about this episode and the seizure is caused
(I think this article
sums everything up pretty well), so if you want to know more about the
science of what happened here, check that out.

The incident was given the name "Pokemon Shock" by the Japanese
media.
Effects
on Pokemon - Pokemon's vanishing act and the four month hiatusAfter reports that children had gotten sick began to
circulate, a tremendous fallout began.

TV-Tokyo, the network that
airs Pocket Monsters,
apologized the following day and abruptly pulled the
show from its schedule. While they launched an internal
investigation to find out why this happened, the network put a show
called Yamazaki,
the King of the Class (学級王ヤマザキ) in Pocket
Monsters' old time slot.

The Japanese
Wikipedia page for the Pokemon Shock incident states that
radio show that voice actress Inuyama Inuko had at the time, "Inuyama
Inuko's Pokemon Hour" (犬山犬子のポケモンアワー), addressed the
incident shortly after the episode aired. According to
the article, a listener called in to Ms. Inuyama and asked two
questions; are they
ever going to air an edited version of the Porygon episode, and are
they ever going to get around to airing "Rougela's Christmas."
In regards to the Porygon episode, Inuyama Inuko said that they would
like them to treat the episode as an "illusion" and as "an episode that
never existed"
(「あの回（第38話）は幻にしてほしい」「なかった話としてほしい) but that they definitely do
want to air the Rougela episode
(あと次回分で予告された『ルージュラのクリスマス』の放送は必ずやるので安心してほしい」).

It looks like Ms. Inuyama's
wishes may be coming true. The
episode has never been re-aired, and, as far as all the official
companies are concerned, the episode doesn't exist. The episode's title is missing
from all officiallistings
of the series. In fact, the desire to expunge this episode from
existence
even went as far as to omit it from the Pocket Monsters
Film Comic, the books that take screenshots from the episodes and
arranges them into a comic book retelling of the episode.

There
are claims
that the episode was banned by the government itself and has been
either destroyed or locked in a vault somewhere, but I've found nothing
to suggest that those are anything more than mere Internet
rumors.

A number of Pokemon-themed
specials scheduled for the end of 1997 and the beginning of 1998 were
also canceled as a part of the network's Pokemon blackout.
TV-Tokyo's
variety show "News! The Decisive Source "A Pokemon Course for
Father""
(情報! ソースが決め手 "お父さんのためのポケモン講座") was swapped out with a
highlights-of-the-year special. The December 30th episode
of
the network's video game variety show "64 Mario Stadium" (64マリオスタジアム)
was postponed until January 18th because it featured a "Pokemon Corner"
segment. Reruns of Episodes 025 and 026 of the Moomin TV series aired
on the originally scheduled date instead. The "New Year's Eve
Pocket
Monsters Encore" (大晦日だよポケットモンスターアンコール) special was canceled and
replaced with a rerun of Mojackou
(モジャ公). A mini-special named "Pokemon
Quiz" (ポケモンクイズ) was replaced with "Special Program - Gift
Recommendations for the New Year" (お年玉付き新春オススメとくばん).

Meanwhile, the NHK apologized for not
investigating an incident that
occurred in March of that same year when an episode of YAT
Relief!
Space Travel (YAT安心!宇宙旅行) caused similar symptoms in four
children. The network didn't launch an investigation at the time
because of the small number of victims, but the Pokemon Shock incident
kind of reminded them that, yeah, they probably should have done
something about that at the time.After
months of fans expressing their desire for the show to return to
the air, TV-Tokyo made an announcement on March 30th that the show
would be returning to the air. When the show was welcomed back
with
back-to-back episodes on April 16th, 1998, it was moved from 6:30pm Tuesdays
to 7:00pm Thursdays. Overall, the show's
hiatus lasted four months.

Effects
on Pokemon - Bye Bye PorygonIn addition to all this, Porygon itself has become
sort of the black
sheep of the pokemon universe. Ever since its debut episode, the
pokemon and its evolutions (Porygon 2 and Porygon Z) have never had an
episode to
themselves. They're still in the games and the comics and all
that,
but as far as the TV series is concerned, they don't exist.

Many
people are understandably upset by this. After all, it was Pikachu
who launched the seizure-inducing attack, not Porygon. Why isn't
that electric rat banned instead?

The thing is, Porygon will always be tied to
this episode because of our tendency to label episodes based on the
pokemon who stars in them. If I say that I want to talk about the
Garura episode, for example, you know exactly
what episode I'm
talking about. If I say "the Ponyta episode," you know that I
mean
"The Big Race of Blazing Pokemon." Episodes tend to get labeled
depending on the star, and in this case, Porygon was the main
attraction. Not Pikachu.

I agree that it sucks for Porygon, but there really isn't much that can
be done about it.

But why was all this necessary?All of
these cancellations and apologies may seem ridiculous from a Western
point of view, but the
handling of
the incident is standard protocol for these types of things in
Japan. Just look around the Japanese media for a bit. L'Arc
en Ciel drummer Sakura
was arrested for heroin possession, so the Rurouni Kenshin ending theme the
band had performed, The Fourth Avenue Cafe, was
hastily swapped out for Heart of
Sword. Yamamoto Keiichi, one half of the comedy duo
Gokuraku Tonbo, was arrested for allegedly assaulting a minor.
After the scandal broke out, the desire to keep him off the airwaves
went as far as re-shooting
scenes he did for a drama called "Tokyo Tower" in order to erase
him from the program. In February 2009, Happy End
guitarist Suzuki Shigeru was arrested for possession of marijuana and
was dropped from his record label of forty
years. In
April 2009, SMAP member Kusanagi Tsuyoshi
was arrested for public nudity in April 2009 and was subsequently
dropped from his scheduled TV appearances and ad campaigns.

You
can argue
that what happened with the Pokemon Shock incident wasn't as bad as a
lot of the things I just listed. After all, it was only a tiny
percentage of the millions
of people who watched the show who were affected. And it's not
like
anybody died, right?

The fact
that the
victims were young children
makes all the difference here. It seems like the overwhelming
majority
of the people
affected were elementary school kids, with only a few of the victims
being any older than that. And you all know as well as I do that
people have much larger reactions when minors are involved. It's
just
the way we are.

Effects
on Pokemon - Episode OrderThe four month
hiatus prevented subsequent episodes from airing in their originally
intended order. Here is how OLM originally intended the show to
air alongside the way it actually aired, according to TV schedules
released at the time:

Originally
Planned Broadcast

Actual
Broadcast

039

"Rougela's
Christmas"

12/23/1997

039

"Pikachu's
Forest"

04/16/1998

---

"It's
New Year's Eve! Pocket Monsters Encore"

12/31/1997

040

"The
Four Eevee Brothers"

04/16/1998

040

"Iwaku
as a Bivouac"

01/06/1998

041

"Wake
Up! Kabigon!"

04/23/1998

042

"The
Four Eevee Brothers"

01/13/1998

042

"Showdown!
Pokemon Gym!"

04/30/1998

043

"Wake
Up! Kabigon!"

01/20/1998

043

"The
March of the Nassy Gang!"

05/07/1998

044

"Showdown!
Pokemon Gym!"

01/27/1998

044

"Paras
and Parasect"

05/14/1998

045

"The
March of the Nassy Gang!"

02/03/1998

...

046

"Paras
and Parasect"

02/10/1998

065

"Rougela's
Christmas"

10/05/1998

...

066

"Iwaku
as a Bivouac"

10/05/1998

As you can see, "Rougela's Christmas" and "Iwaku as a Bivouac" were
skipped over for the actual broadcast and aired much later than
intended. The aforementioned New Year's Eve special that was
meant to air
between them was
canceled altogether. An episode I can't find any
evidence of ever being in the works, "Pikachu's
Forest," was thrown
together to become the first episode to air after the show's hiatus
came to an end.

The
reason Satoshi still has a Hitokage in "Rougela's Christmas" and "Iwaku
as a Bivouac" is because they were originally intended to air after the
Porygon episode, well before the pokemon evolved into Lizardon.

We can guess the effects the break had on later episodes, too. If
the break had never happened, it's safe to assume that "Fierce
Fighting!
Pokemon Girl's Day" would have aired on March 3rd and
"It's Children's Day, Everyone Gather" would have aired on May 5th.
Both of those episodes are holiday themed, and both of those holidays
just happened to fall on a Tuesday in 1998. This is pretty
interesting because this means that the two episodes were not meant to
air back to back the way they eventually ended up airing.
Assuming the
show didn't take any breaks or have any hour-long specials, there would
have been eight episodes between the Girl's Day episode and the
Children's Day episode.

A March 3rd airing of the Girl's Day episode would have also meant that
the episode would have aired before "Kamonegi's Easy Mark" since there
would
have only been two Tuesdays between "Paras and Parasect" (originally
scheduled to air on February 10th) and March 3rd. Musashi already
has her Beroringa in the Kamonegi episode, so it seems that it was
originally meant to air after
the Girl's Day episode, not before.

Musashi
and her Beroringa face off against a Togepi-less Kasumi in "Fierce
Fighting! Pokemon Girl's Day."

Musashi
calls out to her Beroringa in "Kamonegi's Easy Mark."

"Rival Showdown! The Orchid Laboratory" is another example of an
episode affected by the four month delay.
The episode, which features the destruction of the Rocket-Dan's base at
the hands of Myuutwo, didn't end up
airing until October 8th, 1998. If you take that airdate and move
it four months earlier - the same amount of time that the show was off
the air - you can see that it would have aired right before before Myuutwo Strikes Back hit
theaters. There's no way that was
just a coincidence.

Musashi and Kojirou find their Boss after
his base was destroyed by Myuutwo.

There
are probably even more delays caused by the four-month hiatus that we
would have no way of knowing about. I would assume that by the
end of the Kanto Region, the writers would have everything sorted out
and that everything from the Orange Islands onward aired as originally
intended.

Effects
on Pokemon - The editing of existing episodes and the creation of
future episodesAfter the incident, OLM and TV-Tokyo went back to all the
episodes they had made up to that point and re-edited them to fit with
the new guidelines
that had been put in place by the National
Association of Broadcasters in Japan. Scenes with a lot of
flashing or
quick cuts were darkened and slowed down even though those very same
scenes had already aired without incident.

Another change made was to the show's opening theme, Mezase Pokemon Master. In
the pre-Pokemon Shock days, each instance of the word "naka" at the beginning of the song
were accompanied by a full-screen image of a random pokemon. For
all broadcasts after the incident, those full-screen images were shrunk
down to a fourth of their size and placed four to a screen. This
way, only a small portion of the screen would flash when the image
changed
rather than the entire thing.

Certain scenes were dimmed down, slowed
down, or a combination of both in order to conform to the guidelines
set up after the Pokemon Shock incident.

Episodes
that were still in production when the Pokemon Shock incident
occurred had to be edited similarly. One really obvious example
of this are blizzard scenes in "Iwaku as a Bivouac," which appear
really choppy due to the fact that the animators had to remove frames
in order to adhere to the new guidelines. When the first movie
was released in theaters, a message assuring parents that the movie
didn't contain any flashing scenes was displayed in the trailers.

The text at the bottom of the screen reads
"Theatrical Edition Pocket Monsters refrains from using extreme scenes"
(劇場版「ポケットモンスター」は過激な映像表現を抑えて制作します。). Click on the image to view a
larger version.

Episodes made after the incident were created with these new guidelines
in place and therefore did not require any additional editing.

Effects
on the animation industry
The Pokemon Shock incident had effects that rippled throughout the
entire Japanese animation industry. These effects are still being
felt today.

Since the
guidelines were created to regulate harmful stimuli in kids' shows,
animation studios
have had to rethink the way they produce their shows. Currently,
networks like TV-Tokyo, Fuji TV, TV Asahi, ytv, and CBC display a
warning message at the beginning of the programs they broadcast.
The message,
which is usually something like "When watching TV, make sure the room
is well lit and that you're not sitting too close to the TV"
(テレビを見るときは部屋を明るくして離れて見てください) appear as captions that disappear a few
seconds into the show. Putting up these warnings is
completely voluntary, and different networks can decide when and how
often to display them. The warnings typically don't
appear
on the DVDs or on the versions of the show being streamed on Internet
sites
like Hulu.
Reruns of
older cartoons were edited in ways similar to how older Pocket Monsters episodes were
edited. Shows like Revolutionary Girl Utena, Crayon Shin-chan, Rurouni Kenshin, Dragon
Ball, Doraemon, and Flame of Recca have all had
certain episodes
re-edited to slow down and dim scenes that no longer conform to modern
day guidelines.

In order to
conform to modern-day regulations, Toei had to reanimate Goku' s and
Vegeta's beam struggle for Dragon
Ball Kai. On the left is the scene as seen in Dragon Ball Z,
while the version on
the right is the reanimated Dragon
Ball Kai version. It's hard to tell from the still
screenshots, but the Dragon Ball Z
version flashes with a strobe light-like effect while the Dragon Ball
Kai version does not.

Foreign
programming must adhere to the guidelines as well. The 2003
TMNT series had
frames removed and
/ or slowed down in order to adhere to Japanese television
guidelines. Light saber battles in Star Wars movies get slowed
down
and dimmed whenever they air on TV. A scene in the first Harry
Potter movie is slowed down and dimmed down whenever
lightning
strikes.

The scene where Harry, Ron, and Hermione
fight a troll in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's (Sorcerer's) Stone
is
edited to slow down the lightning.

Like their
domestic counterparts, these scenes are shown unedited in the home
video release.

Does an English version exist?We
have quotes from MaddieBlaustein
saying that they dubbed an edited version of the
episode, but I have my doubts about that for a number of reasons.

For one thing, the idea that 4Kids was given a tape to dub and then
distribute to American TV networks in the first place just doesn't make
any sense.
We know that TV-Tokyo,
OLM, Nintendo, and everyone else involved with the creation of this
episode wants us to all act like this
whole thing never happened. So why, then, would
they give a tape to 4Kids so they could
release it overseas? We know from the Pokémon 4Ever DVD
commentary that they didn't start dubbing the series until April 1998,
and we know that the versions of the episodes they got were the
post-Porygon
edits. Yet we're to believe that, despite all this, 4Kids was
given a tape anyway?

I know it sounds like I'm calling Maddie Blaustein a liar, but I'm
not. I'm just saying that it's entirely possible that she was
mis-remembering things. She made the comments ten years after
Season One premiered on American TV; it's entirely possible that she
got it mixed up with one of the other hundreds of episodes she had done
up to that point. You can argue that an episode like this would
stand
out, but can we really know that for sure? 4Kids edits the
episodes before the voice actors ever step into the recording booth, so
she wouldn't have noticed anything out of place in this episode.

So what about "A Way
Off Day Off," that Orange Islands episode that featured Porygon as the
"Who's That Pokémon?" It has a new voice for the dub, so a
lot of people jumped to the conclusion that the voice we hear during
the eyecatch is the same voice 4Kids ended up using for that lost dub
of the Porygon episode. What these people are ignoring, however,
is that it really doesn't take a whole lot to hop into a recording
booth, say "Porygon" a few times, and then hop out. Why give it a
dub voice when its name is the same in both languages, you may
ask? It's simple - if 4Kids was never given a copy of the
episode, they wouldn't have access to the audio of Porygon's Japanese
voice, either.

(By the way, I can't wait for someone to scroll through this essay
without reading it, see the two images up there, and then post them
elsewhere claiming they were taken from the dub of the Porygon episode)

In my mind, we really don't have any concrete proof that the episode
was ever dubbed. All those people claiming otherwise are just
reiterating the rumors they heard elsewhere on the Internet.

Is a home release likely?
The short answer; no. The long answer; read what I wrote in
regards to "The Legend of Miniryuu."

All of the same issues with regards to the desire to avoid bad press
applies to this episode as well. Hell, it probably applies even more in this case since
you'd also have people in Japan, in addition to people in America,
trying to block
a release of this episode. Those who believe that everything
will be OK if they just slow things down or just cut out the offending
scene altogether really don't know how TV works.

Final Thought
The 38th episode of Pocket Monsters
is one that will live on forever. It's a piece of animation
history, and we all have a chance to witness it. Like the
Miniryuu episode
before it, finding bootlegged versions of this episode is
extraordinarily easy, so I highly recommend you check it out if you
haven't already.